His father Dr. Hugh Horner was a four-term member of Parliament in the John Diefenbaker Conservative government in the late 1960s before he was lured into provincial politics by Peter Lougheed in 1967. Doc Horner, one of the original six Progressive Conservatives who ended the Social Credit dynasty in 1971, was Lougheed's deputy premier until he retired.

"I was able to come into the legislature and hang out with dad every once in awhile," the younger Horner recalls. "They would have some interesting discussions."

His grandfather Ralph Horner was a Saskatchewan senator, his uncle "Cactus Jack" Horner was an Alberta Tory MP who crossed the floor to join Pierre Trudeau's Liberal cabinet. Another uncle Norval Horner also served as an MP along with another uncle, Albert Horner. At one point there were four Horners on Parliament Hill.

Barrhead farmer Jeff McEachern says with that kind of political pedigree, he is not surprised his childhood friend is making a bid to become Alberta's 14th premier.

"It was one of his dreams when we were kids," explains McEachern, who was a best man at Horner's wedding. "When we were sitting around the campfire talking about what we wanted to do in life, that was his goal."

Horner, 50, the youngest of four brothers, was born in Barrhead Jan. 17, 1961, and lived in town the first years of his life, but spent his early teens living and working on the 570-hectare farm, helping his second eldest brother Bruce tend to the cow-calf operation.

"I did the haying in the summer time and the fencing and picked a lot of rocks," he says. He also did a bit of trapping, hunting and camping when he wasn't attending school in Barrhead. In winter, he also played hockey.

From high school he went to Swan Hills to work in the oilpatch and later toiled in a lumber mill and on a pipeline.

"I had a lot of jobs," he says. "I kept moving from one to another that would pay me more money."

After marrying his girlfriend, Rose, on Aug. 30, 1980, Horner moved to Calgary to pursue a business marketing diploma at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.

He worked part time at Alberta Treasury Branches and pumped gas at a service station past midnight before landing a full-time job with the Royal Bank after he graduated. Over the next few years, he worked at several Calgary banks, as well as banks in Cochrane, Consort and Slave Lake, before he tired of that.

"I wanted to be in business, but I was not sure I wanted to be in banking," he explains.

Horner thought about entering politics, but his father advised him to attain more life experience, so he launched into a milling business with his father and older brother.

He moved back to Barrhead and started Westglen Milling with his brother Dave, marketing the flour under the brand name Doc's Best.

"We would throw a pallet of that in the back of my halfton truck and I would drive around the province trying to sell it to grocery stores," he said. "It was a struggle because we didn't have a big enough market for the amount of capacity we had. I decided I had to find a new market."

Horner contacted Canadian embassies around the world to see if there were any users of the product and found one in Venezuela where pearl barley was used to prevent dysentery.

Horner flew to Caracas, found a couple of clients, and began exporting to 24 countries that would use his products. The family went on to partner with major food giant ConAgra to build an oat mill in northern Alberta and began selling oats to Quaker Oats, Kellogg and Gerbers.

He also joined the Canadian Forces reserves in 1989, fulfilling a dream he had to join the military. "I had always secretly wanted to be a soldier so I became a weekend warrior instead," he says.

Horner joined the Loyal Edmonton Regiment, took basic training at Meaford, Ont., and participated in training exercises at Wainwright.

It wasn't easy. At age 29, he was the second-oldest soldier in his basic training course, but thrived on the camaraderie, team-building and leadership training.

But his business commitments and its related international travel took a toll and he requested an honourable discharge in 1993.

"I would get off the plane and come home and say hi to my wife and kids and grab my kit and head into Edmonton for parade or training exercises," he said. "I felt in fairness to them and in fairness to my family, I had to give it up."

When the oat business bottomed out, Horner was recruited by ConAgra to work out of Nebraska as the company's international sales manager for specialty grains.

He moved his wife and three children and a dog and a cat to Omaha in 1993. For three years he peddled ConAgra products around the world.

"One month I would be down in Puerto Rico, Caracas, Panama, Nicaragua, Chile and Mexico and the next month I would be in Asia," he recalls. "But we wanted to move home. I felt I could start a company based on the relationships I had."

He returned to Alberta and launched Timber Wolf Trading, named after a wolf he encountered one day on the farm.

Business prospered, but Horner became so disenchanted with Alberta's lack of investment for the future, he says he decided one day to go into the local MLAs's office to give him a piece of his mind. The MLA was nineterm veteran Ken Kowalski, his father's former executive assistant, and now legislature speaker.

"I decided to tell Ken Kowalski he was doing everything wrong, which is not an easy thing to do with Mr. Kowalski," Horner explained in a recent address to rural politicians, drawing guffaws from the crowd. He said Kowalski urged him to run for office. So he did.

"I told my wife I could do this political thing in the afternoon and run the business in the mornings. She bought it," Horner added.

He knocked off two-term Liberal MLA Colleen Soetart in 2001 in the riding of Spruce Grove-Sturgeon-St. Albert and three years later, Ralph Klein made him his minister of agriculture during the mad cow crisis.

Horner soon found out he couldn't run his businesses part-time and eventually sold them.

For most of his political life, Horner has mostly stayed under the media's radar. When reporters sought to grill him on issues in his portfolio as agriculture minister or later when he served as minister of advanced education and technology, they often had to do it on the run, trotting beside him with their microphones as he walked briskly from cabinet to his office.

His executive assistant Tim Schultz says when he and Horner were growing up together in Barrhead, he was impressed that Horner could carry on an intelligent conversation on any subject.

He began working on Horner's election campaigns, eventually becoming his executive assistant at the legislature, because he was impressed with Horner's ability to find common ground on issues where there was often a great divergence of opinion.

"I have not found anyone with that ability at Doug's level," he says. "It's one of the biggest reasons I didn't have any hesitation to work on his campaign for the leadership."

As for the man outside politics, Schultz says his boss is a closet Calgary Stampeders fan. But that hasn't been a hurdle in drawing support from northern Alberta caucus colleagues.

Horner, who also served as deputy premier, has more than a dozen MLAs endorsing his leadership bid, including a half-dozen cabinet ministers credited with propelling Ed Stelmach to the premier's office in the last race.

Agriculture Minister Jack Hayden says he supports Horner because of his honesty, integrity, hard work and experience, and because he has a good understanding of both rural and urban issues.

Horner's rivals have painted him as a Stelmach loyalist and a status quo candidate, but Infrastructure minister Ray Danyluk says he's definitely not anyone's "yes-man."

Solicitor General Frank Oberle calls him "a rock-solid guy," and Transportation Minister Luke Ouellette says he is impressed with Horner's experience running a business that catered to markets around the world.

Ouellette said he believes having to meet a payroll every week builds character in a man. And in an obvious dig at rival Gary Mar, adds: "It's a little bit different than being on a government payroll all your life."

dhenton@calgaryherald.com

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